But he apparently thought he’d just better just go along with me—as if maybe I’d hit my head, too, when I’d fallen down—since he went, “Why don’t we wait and see.”

Well, it was better than nothing, I guess. I gave him my mom’s and dad’s work numbers, then closed my eyes and leaned my head back against the side of the ambulance.

Oh, well, I thought. Things could have been worse.

For instance, I could have a chicken bone where my nose should be.

Top ten Pieces of Incontrovertible Proof that Stopping a Bullet from Entering the Skull of the President of the United States of America Changes Your Life:

10.  The ambulance you are riding in gets a police escort all the way to the hospital. George Washington University Hospital, to be exact. The same hospital they took President Reagan to, when he got shot.

9.  Instead of having to visit the triage nurse upon arrival at the emergency room, like everyone else, you are wheeled in right away, ahead of all the gang-bangers bleeding from knife wounds, women in labour, people with pencils wedged into their eye sockets, etc.

8.  Everywhere you are sent inside George Washington University Hospital, men in black suits with ear thingies follow you.

7.  When they give you a hospital gown to wear because your clothes are wet, and you refuse to put it on because the back is all cut out, they give you another one, so you can wear one that opens in the front and one that opens in the back, thus covering all of you. No one else in the entire hospital gets two gowns but you.

6.  You get your own private room with armed guards at the door, even though all that is wrong with you is your wrist.

5.  When the doctor comes in to examine you, he goes, “So you’re the girl who saved the President!”

4.  When you say in abject mortification, “Well, not really,” the doctor goes, “That’s not what I hear. You’re a national hero!”

3.  When he tells you that your wrist is broken in two places and that you will have to wear a cast from the elbow down for six weeks, instead of giving you a lollipop or whatever, he asks for your autograph.

2.  While you are waiting for the cast guys to come and fix your arm, you switch on your private room’s TV and see that on every channel there is a Breaking News bulletin. Then Tom Brokaw comes on and says that an attempt has been made on the life of the President. Then he says that the attempt was thwarted by the heroic act of a single individual. Then they show the picture of you from your school ID.

The one where you were blinking just as the photographer took the picture.

The one where your hair was looking particularly bushy and out of control.

The one you have never showed to anyone for fear of being publicly mocked and ridiculed.

And the number one way you can tell your life is over:

1.  You scream so loudly when you see your hideous school photo on national television that about thirty Secret Service agents burst into your room, pistols drawn, demanding to know if you’re all right.

I guess even then it didn’t really hit me.